Sunday Submissions: ‘Nimrod’ Seeking MENA Stories, Poems

For their Spring/Summer 2019 issue, which they intend to title “Voices of the Middle East and North Africa,” the Nimrod International Journal is looking for “poems, short stories, creative nonfiction pieces, and translations from writers from the Middle East and North Africa”:

This, they write, means “writers currently living in this region, writers from the region currently living abroad, and writers of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.”

Further:

With this issue, we seek to celebrate writers and writing from this region, to highlight the diverse cultures and people within it, and to enrich and add complexity to the representation and understanding of the Middle East and North Africa.It is often spoken of as if it were one homogeneous swath of the globe, and indeed, less than 1% of Arabic and Persian literature is translated into English, further adding to this perceived sameness. But it is in fact a collection of countries straddling three continents, all with diverse cultures and histories, with similarities anddistinct differences—and it is this richness and diversity of thought and culture that we wish to call attention to in this issue. We hope to include work by writers in as many of the groups within the region as possible: work by writers who identify as Arab, Israeli, Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, and more; work translated from Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Berber, and more; and work from writers of the many faiths practiced in the region, as well as those who follow no particular faith.

They stress that this work doesn’t nee to be “about the Middle East,” and note that “while we certainly welcome work about, for example, the idea of the Middle East and/or North Africa as a region; the individual countries and groups within the region; what it means tosay “the Middle East”; issues of colonialism in the region; writers’ personal heritage; the work submitted for the issue is not limited to these subjects.”